The Splendid Blond Beast

by Simpson, Christopher; Miller, Mark Crispin;

  The American response to the emerging leadership clique foreshadowed what was to unfold in the U.S. occupation zone over the next year. This was months before Germany’s surrender, at a time when Roosevelt was still in the White House, U.S. unity with the Soviets was still ostensibly strong, and anti-Nazi sentiment among U.S. forces was at a high tide. “Behind the scenes in the MG offices a storm was raging. It revolved around the basic question of retention of Nazis and other undesirable characters in office,” according to Padover. “MG itself was split into three wings, Right, Left, and Center. A majority of MG officers were on the extreme Right and supported the [new] administration; their business, they said coldly, was ‘efficiency,’ and not politics. A minority, consisting of the deputy [military governor] and two lieutenants, were more or less on the Left and urged the elimination of Nazis. In the Center was Major J., the Military Government Officer. Major J., an affable officer who knew little about Germany and nothing of the German language, was perfectly neutral on the subject of Nazis.” There were fifty-five Nazis in middle- and high-level posts in the local administration at that point, Padover reports. “Major J. said that one must go slowly in getting rid of them, because they were indispensable. ‘Where,’ he asked, ‘would you find competent people who are not Nazis?’”39

  Padover’s study concluded that the root of U.S. inertia in Germany involved politics, bureaucracy, and social attitudes based on class.

  An MG team is judged on its efficiency and performance record. Thus when an MG group enters a city, its first consideration is functional, not political. No political intelligence officer accompanied the MG team into Aachen. In fact, no officer, outside of the medical officer, could speak German; none had any first-hand German experience.

  An MG team, therefore, will employ almost anybody it believes capable of putting a town on a functioning basis. Thus Nazi sympathizers, Party members, or German nationalists, are appointed by MG as the only available specialists. These specialists, who look extremely presentable and have professional backgrounds similar to those of MG officers, then place their like-minded friends in secondary positions. As a consequence, MG’s initial indifference to the politics of the situation leads in the end to a political mess. Then comes the complicated attempts by CIC [Army counterintelligence] to weed out the undesirables, and the MG officers find themselves in the unpleasant position of having either to defend Nazis or of starting all over again.40

  Padover’s study led to a scandal and reforms at about the same time the controversy over Pell’s dismissal erupted. Congressional and public pressure led the U.S. military governor to purge about two dozen former Nazis from the Aachen government. Most of these officials were in fact small fry, including the janitor at the local school. Aacheners responding to the U.S. public opinion survey asked openly, “Are you going to sit back now and let the big Nazis rule,” as an elderly woman put it, “now that you are satisfied that you have thrown out the Nazi janitors?”41

  13

  “This Needs to Be Dragged Out Into the Open”

  The day after Christmas 1944, just as the Pell controversy was coming to a head, Allen Dulles proposed a plan to Washington under which German industrialists and “technical men … with brilliant industrial records” who had worked for the Nazis were to be offered amnesty by the OSS in order to retain them as “valuable sources of information” for postwar reconstruction.1 The first men Dulles sponsored illustrate the moral questions that inevitably arise in such programs. They were a pair of brothers said to be named Schmidt—Dulles wasn’t certain of the details. One of them ran a munitions plant at Eisenach, and the other was a senior executive with Messerschmitt in charge of that company’s construction of underground factories and of warplane plants near Vienna. Now that the war was clearly lost, Dulles said, the Schmidt brothers were looking for a safe way out.

  The ethical dilemma was obvious. On one hand, the Schmidt brothers might in fact have information useful to the Allied war effort. On the other hand, there could be little doubt that if the Schmidts held the positions that Dulles said they did, their careers had been made at least in part through the exploitation of forced labor, for that was undeniably the foundation of German arms production throughout the war. The Messerschmitt Schmidt would also be a suspect in Nazi extermination-through-labor efforts, as prisoners made up most of the workforce in German underground factory construction. Dulles was surely aware, at least in general terms, of the criminal character of much of German war production: The French guerrillas he was underwriting were made up mainly of men who had gone to the hills rather than face forced labor in German munitions factories.

  If one concedes that in certain circumstances a greater evil could be avoided by giving amnesty to men like the Schmidts, then exactly how far and on what terms should such protection be extended? In this case, Dulles based his appeal for the Schmidts on particularly flimsy evidence. He told Washington that he had been “reliably informed” that the two brothers were “nonpolitical” with “brilliant industrial records,” yet the OSS man was uncertain of their names and had no means of checking any information about their activities. And what of the “Schmidts” who contacted the OSS after the German surrender? Should they, too, receive the same amnesty so that they could become “valuable sources of information,” as Dulles put it, “in the post-collapse period”?2

  Allen Dulles understood that there were splits between the German economic elite and the diehard Nazis, and he favored dividing these groups to the greatest degree possible. He believed he could extract economic and military intelligence from the Nazis’ partners, sow disorder in Axis ranks, and preserve business and political leaders favoring private enterprise for postwar reconstruction.

  Dulles offered cooperative Axis leaders promises of protection from prosecution for their crimes and asylum from the advancing Red Army.3 The collaborators often faced charges of treason—a capital crime under most nations’ laws—as well as accusations of exploitation of slave labor, racial persecution, looting, and other offenses regarded as war crimes or crimes against humanity. Dulles also appealed to the class interests of former collaborators, to their desire to protect Western civilization against communism, and to similar less tangible factors. But protection from prosecution was the sine qua non for collaborators’ cooperation with Dulles. His effectiveness as an intelligence-network builder and as a political broker for peace negotiations was based largely on the premise that the West’s wartime cooperation with the Soviets would soon collapse. This offered a brief window of opportunity for compromised Germans and Axis executives quick-witted enough to switch sides now, he said. Time was already running out.

  The Western response to Nazi collaborators emerged as an important political debate among the Allies, because collaborators usually had a two-sided political character. On one hand, they had actively helped the Nazis achieve their ends—that, after all, was why the Nazis had recruited collaborators in the first place. On the other hand, many collaborators laid claim to having taken some action in opposition to the Nazis, usually in the last days of Nazi power, which they asserted proved that they had been secret sympathizers with the Resistance all along, operating in the heart of the enemy camp.

  Collaboration during the Nazi occupation in Europe had been most pronounced in the political and business elites and in the police forces of the countries under Berlin’s hegemony. In Vichy France, for example, “There were in fact few genuinely ‘new men’ in office at Vichy, men who had held no major responsibilities under the [pre-war] Third Republic,” Robert Paxton wrote in a classic study of Vichy. While French brownshirts “found places in the realms of order [i.e., police] and propaganda, especially later in the regime … they never gained influence in the vital fields of finance, defence, or diplomacy. On the contrary, some elements of Third Republic leadership passed directly into the Vichy regime almost without change of personnel. Senior civil servants and the mass of public officials went on with their jobs, with the excepti
on of Jews, officials of Masonic orders, some prefects tied too closely to the [leftist] Popular Front, and a handful of top officials personally linked to Paul Reynaud.… The Third Republic’s business elite went on virtually unchanged. Jewish businessmen, of course, were penalized, along with those who joined de Gaulle, but no leading businessman comes to mind in that category.

  “Vichy was run to a large degree by a selection of what French political sociologists usefully call ‘notables’: people of already high attainment in the worlds of public administration, business, the professions, and local affairs.” In Vichy, Paxton continued, “the real power of the unelected French elite was made manifest.”4

  The situation in other conquered countries varied, of course, and in each country (including Germany itself) the elite’s enthusiasm for the Nazis ebbed as the tide of war turned. Nevertheless, except in Poland and the occupied territories of the USSR,* the Nazis consistently succeeded in enlisting the assistance of much of the established power structure, civil service personnel, and police.

  Wartime collaboration with the Nazis frequently had a distinct class character, as Vichy showed. Complicity with the Nazis tended to follow the lines of the existing political, economic, and social power in the countries dominated by Hitler’s government. The same was true to an important extent within Germany itself.

  Put bluntly, almost any conventional postwar government on the Continent that seriously attempted to free itself from the influence of wartime collaborators would soon be cutting into its own bone and sinew, just as Turkey had discovered when it attempted to prosecute the genocidal Ittihad leaders after the First World War. The “integrating institutions” of society had often played a crucial role in the Holocaust and other crimes. But this could not be acknowledged in Europe, much less prosecuted, without damaging the legitimacy of postwar society itself. This the U.S. and its non-Soviet Allies were unwilling to do, for fear of the geopolitical and economic consequences of potential revolutions in Germany, Italy, France, Greece, and perhaps other countries as well.

  The State Department’s “Riga” faction, which had refused to intervene in European affairs on behalf of Jewish refugees during the war, led the way in insisting that the U.S. intervene on behalf of threatened European elites after the conflict was over. These two tactics, which might seem at first to be contradictory, were in fact based on what seemed to them to be the overriding importance of preserving a stable European political center, with relatively open markets, and a willingness to cooperate with U.S. geopolitical and economic strategies. This was the purported “vital national interest” of which Allen Dulles had spoken.

  General Eisenhower’s political advisor from the State Department, Robert Murphy, became one of the most influential advocates of close U.S. relations with Nazi collaborators, particularly those of the Vichy type. Murphy had risen through the ranks at the State Department after World War I because of his talent for diplomacy and his ability to find common cause between U.S. foreign interests and the old guard of the European establishment. Early in the war, Murphy had brokered the deal with the one-time Vichy collaborator Admiral Jean Darlan.

  For Murphy and for Allen Dulles, George Kennan, and other “Riga” faction advocates, men such as Darlan were integral to the overall U.S. political strategy for the war. As Murphy and his allies saw things, Communists and left-wing Socialists were likely to make substantial political gains after the war because of their roles in the Resistance, notwithstanding the Communist parties’ ambivalence during the 1939–41 Hitler-Stalin pact. If the U.S. wanted something other than revolutionary governments in Europe, Murphy contended, it would have to reach an understanding with the indigenous leaders who had worked for the Germans. Why should the U.S. forswear the cooperation of such men, he asked, particularly when they seemed to have already proved their capacity to rule?

  Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau and his allies regarded Murphy as a complacent appeaser of Nazism, a man whose inaction and deceit had contributed significantly to the U.S. government’s failure to rescue innocent people from the Holocaust and a reactionary who was willing to throw away possibilities for a peaceful postwar world to satisfy the ideological demands of anti-communism. The collision between the two officials began early and grew more and more bitter. By 1945, Morgenthau was using almost every audience he had with Roosevelt to argue for Murphy’s dismissal as chief U.S. political advisor in Europe.

  In the last days of 1944, as Dulles in Bern drafted his brief for the Schmidt brothers, Morgenthau was in Washington drawing up what amounted to a manifesto on Germany for Roosevelt. Three points seemed basic to Morgenthau: Germany had the will to try once more to conquer the world; it would require many years for democracy and reeducation to achieve any real change in Germany’s political culture; and the survival of its heavy industry would once again give Germany a warmaking capacity in the near future, perhaps within the next five years. Morgenthau concluded his analysis as follows:

  The more I think of this problem, the more I read and hear discussions of it, the clearer it seems to me that the real motive of those who oppose a weak Germany is not any actual disagreement on these three points. On the contrary, it is simply an expression of fear of Russia and communism. It is the twenty-year-old idea of a ‘bulwark against Bolshevism’—which was one of the factors which brought this present war down on us. But people who hold this view are unwilling (for reasons which, no doubt, they regard as statesmanlike) to come out in the open and lay the real issue on the table, all sorts of smoke screens are thrown up to support the proposition that Germany must be rebuilt.…

  This thing needs to be dragged out into the open. I feel so deeply about it that I speak strongly. If we don’t face it I am just as sure as I can be that we are going to let a lot of hollow and hypocritical propaganda lead us into recreating a strong Germany and making a foe of Russia. I shudder for the sake of our children to think of what will follow.”5

  Robert Murphy was central to the problem, the treasury secretary believed, and his campaign to remove him continued up to the moment of FDR’s death. As winter slowly gave way to spring in 1945, FDR invited Morgenthau to visit him at Warm Springs, Georgia, where Roosevelt was convalescing. Morgenthau dictated a long note to his diary about the encounter: The President, he said, “had aged terrifically and looked very haggard. His hands shook so that he started to knock the glasses over.… I found his memory bad and he was constantly confusing names.… I have never seen him have so much difficulty.”6

  But FDR seemed a little better after cocktails and dinner, so the two men settled down to talk politics, as had been their custom for almost three decades. “I told the President that [General Lucius] Clay had called on me and I had asked him what he was going to do about Robert Murphy, and he said that he realized that was one of his headaches. The President said, “Well, what’s the matter with Murphy?” And I said … ‘Murphy was too anxious to collaborate [with Darlan and Vichy].’

  “The President said, ‘Well, what have you got on your mind?’ I said, ‘In order to break the State Department crowd … just the way you broke the crowd of Admirals when you were Assistant Secretary of the Navy, my suggestion is that you make Claude Bowers political advisor to Eisenhower.’” (Bowers was a liberal New Dealer who was at that time U.S. ambassador to Chile.) Morgenthau continued that the “President thought that it was a wonderful idea, and so that he wouldn’t forget it, I made him write it down.”7 Morgenthau went on to appeal for Roosevelt’s support in his battle with the State Department over U.S. strategy on Germany and the USSR, and reports in his diary entry that FDR indicated he was with him “100 percent.”

  Roosevelt died the next afternoon. Morgenthau remained as secretary of the treasury during the transition to the new president, Harry Truman, but without FDR’s backing he quickly lost influence within the government. Robert Murphy remained as Eisenhower’s political advisor, and the “State Department crowd,” as Morgenthau had put it, consolidated its hol
d on U.S. foreign policy toward Germany and the USSR.

  Paradoxically, though, their influence in war crimes policy slipped sharply, at least for the moment. The combination of Pell’s dismissal, Padover’s report from Germany, Morgenthau’s activism, and, perhaps most fundamentally, the increasing public knowledge of the Allied failure to respond effectively to Nazi atrocities, each took its toll on the authority of the State Department. U.S. newspapers began to discuss many aspects of the Holocaust and of U.S. war crimes policy in detail for the first time. These factors significantly undermined the ability of the “well-entrenched functionaries,” to use the Washington Post’s phrase, to make basic policy decisions outside of the public eye.8

  Morgenthau worked with Murray Bernays’s boss, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, to draw up a blueprint for denazification in Germany. This was a new compromise plan that melded Morgenthau’s earlier proposals with those of the War Department, and produced relatively hard-hitting policies concerning Nazi criminals and denazification of German industry. The U.S. military command eventually promulgated the order in late April 1945 under the designation “JCS 1067,” meaning Joint Chiefs of Staff order no. 1067.9

  “The principal Allied objective is to prevent Germany from ever again becoming a threat to the peace of the world,” its provisions began. “Essential steps in the accomplishment of this objective are the elimination of Nazism and militarism in all their forms, the immediate apprehension of war criminals for punishment, the industrial disarmament and demilitarization of Germany, with continuing control over Germany’s capacity to make war, and the preparation for eventual reconstruction of German political life on a democratic basis.”10